To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  * * *

  A WORLD OF POSSIBILITIES WITHIN YOUR REACH. In the apartment next door, or perhaps in the one above, a woman would sneeze repeatedly and someone, before or after, began to play the piano. It was always the same sections of the same works: Bach, Schubert, Beethoven. Whoever was playing did so with ease, though not very fluently, getting stuck or stopping always at the same difficult part of a piece. I became as familiar with the repertoire as with the places where the music broke off. I knew Bill Evans had once lived in the building, around 1960, with his partner Ellaine and a cat. It allowed me to think of the possibility that Evans had lived in what was now my apartment. It was when he was recording his live albums at the Village Vanguard with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian in June 1961. The muffled sound of his music as he practiced or composed would have reached me through these very walls. I would play one of his records and the music filtered through the walls and into the lobby as if it were 1961 and he were still alive. Bill Evans was much more real to me than the woman next door, who was perhaps the one who sneezed and played Schubert and Beethoven. Over the years I had run into her three or four times, and we never spoke for more than a few minutes. All I knew about her was what I could infer from the things that turned up at her door. The New York Times, The Nation, packages from Amazon, junk mail, letters soliciting donations.

  * * *

  DON’T WAIT ANY LONGER TO OWN IT. I never saw the people who delivered these things, either, just as I rarely saw those who left a different set of things at my own doorstep, adjacent to hers. On winter days there was sometimes a pair of muddy boots by her door, an open umbrella. Signs like these proved the existence of people I rarely ever saw. A Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders campaign sticker under a peephole. A pink umbrella, a pair of women’s shoes, and a pair of girls’ shoes at the foot of a different door. At first I thought my deep estrangement came from being a new arrival. Then I gradually came to realize that it would not be alleviated by the passage of time, but rather grow more consummate. The longer I lived in the building, the more invisible I became. Sometimes I would hear people laughing in the hallway outside my door, greeting each other with great American cheer. I would look through the peephole curiously, a little enviously, and the laughter was gone, the people had just vanished through doors that once again remained hermetically sealed, the door to the apartment opposite or the door to the elevator. I would come in from the street and greet someone leaving the building and it was as if he had neither seen nor heard me. I would go over to the elevator where somebody else was waiting and say hello again, and they would stand there, just a step away, without even performing the reflex action of turning to face the approach of a fellow creature. I began to think there was a border somewhere between invisibility and nonexistence.

  * * *

  WHAT YOUR IMAGE SAYS ABOUT YOU. Walter Benjamin says that to live is to leave traces. He knew what he was talking about. But if I thought about the traces I would leave behind me once I left, I might as well have never lived here. The only person who never failed to recognize me from a distance and to approach me with signs of joy was a Black homeless woman named Janis. She always wandered around the same part of the neighborhood, between 106th and 107th, near Straus Park. I would sometimes take Riverside Drive so as not to run into her. If I gave her a dollar she made a sad, disappointed face. If I gave her five she asked for ten. She was always decently dressed. She had a wide, pleasant face, with eyes that went in an instant from meek to sarcastic. The day I asked her what her name was she also asked me mine, and where I came from. When I said I was from Spain, she asked if it was true that in my country wild bulls were allowed to roam the streets.

  * * *

  THERE’S A NAME FOR WHAT YOU NEED. After so many years in the city I felt more and more like a ghost. As the time approached to leave for good—for it was clear now that I had come back only to say goodbye, to be there fully one last time—I noticed the same bewilderment as on the distant days of my arrival. Back then I thought the sense of foreignness would fade over time. Now I knew it to be an incurable condition. You think you’ve finally settled in, and it turns out what you have settled into is the small enclave of your foreignness. Half the people here—they themselves, not their parents or their forebears—have come from other countries around the world. My sense of foreignness was the same as that of many others around me, but that was not enough to form a fellowship. Not even a fellowship of strangers. Each foreignness is different from the next, and all remain mutually indissoluble. Religious or patriotic ties can sometimes remedy or soften it; not because they make it easier for people to adapt to this new world, but because they spare them the need to do it. They are here physically, but really they continue to live in the world they left behind, a world they are able to replicate to some degree with the help of their countrymen or those who follow the same religion. Neither option was available to me. Even language failed to establish a meaningful bond, not because it is spoken with different accents but because Spanish is of no use to anyone as a true sign of identity. What does a Dominican or a Puerto Rican living in New York have to do with a Spaniard, a Colombian, or an Argentine?

  * * *

  BE YOURSELF, UNLESS YOU CAN BE BATMAN. I was completely alone. Más solo que la una, to say it the old Spanish way. I was alone in Donald Trump’s terrifying country, ruled now by his entourage of wealthy crooks, all of them as heartless, cruel, and rapacious as birds of prey. I would turn on the radio and his name instantly shot forth like a profanity. Each morning brought its gelid weather forecast and its terrifying piece of news. They wanted to destroy everything as quickly as possible: the Environmental Protection Agency, the environment itself. They were visibly impatient to poison the air with the smoke of power plants, to poison the water with toxic spills. The secretary in charge of public schools was a plutocrat whose priority consisted in dismantling them as soon as possible. The highest official responsible for fighting climate change said that climate change was a hoax made up by the Chinese. The housing secretary was a Black man who said that African slaves had come as immigrants hoping that their grandchildren or their great-grandchildren might one day enjoy the American dream. That phrase, “the American dream,” made me gag again as it never should have stopped doing. A malignant activism made sure no infamy went unaccomplished: they lifted the ban on lead ammunition for hunters on public lands, eager to pollute the water, the earth, and the bodies of animals once more with a toxic metal. They acted with a ruthless Bolshevik resolve, determined to destroy at any cost and as quickly as possible whatever they came upon, inflicting the maximum possible damage on their class enemies.

  * * *

  ONLY ONE OTHER THING IS MORE DESIRABLE. I now admitted to myself that I had never stopped feeling helpless and afraid in this country. Deep down, sometimes with a keen awareness, I had always been afraid of the overbearing power of the police and the impersonal cruelty of a vengeful system of punishment capable of crushing the anonymous and innocent lives of the mentally ill or the wrongly convicted. I felt fear and vertigo when the plane, preparing to land, rolled sideways to begin its descent and you saw through the window the huge planetary scale of the ocean shore, the marshes and woods, the sprawl of identical suburbs and of a city that went on forever, spreading like a galaxy toward the edge of total darkness.

  REPORTING TOOLS IN CASE OF A CATASTROPHE. I had a closer relationship with statues than with actual people: the beautiful statue of Mnemosyne in Straus Park; the Union general on horseback at the end of my block; the Buddhist master outside a nearby temple on Riverside Drive; the Duke Ellington statue on the other side of the park, where Harlem begins, at Fifth Avenue and 110th. I felt called to the statues and even simply to the names on certain street signs. At Eighty-Sixth and Broadway I saw the name of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who lived there when he was already a wealthy and successful man. Two blocks down, at Eighty-Fourth Street, there was an intersection named in honor of Edgar Allan Poe: Edgar Allan Poe Way.
Ranks and distinctions always apply. An Edgar Allan Poe Way is not as important as an Isaac Bashevis Singer Boulevard. My own street, 106th, was named Duke Ellington Boulevard. At Seventy-Seventh and West End there was a Miles Davis Way. Miles Davis lived in a house that now bears a plaque and used to be an old rectory. He lived there for many years like a man buried alive, a vampire shunning the light of day, coming out at night, feeding on cocaine and never sleeping.

  * * *

  EXPERIENCE A TRUE VIRTUAL REALITY. Many years ago, in one of those past lives that only return to us in dreams we instantly forget when we wake up, or fictions we invent, someone told me there was an equestrian statue of Duke Ellington in the neighborhood. Duke Ellington on horseback like a glorious condottiere of Black music, a dandy in an Art Deco tuxedo and a pair of riding boots with spurs, holding a baton in place of a riding whip and standing at the gates of Harlem. Then, in a future life that I never foresaw, I found myself living on this street that bears his name. A boulevard named Duke Ellington is almost as elegant as an equestrian statue of Duke Ellington or as the glorious glow of a Duke Ellington recording. In time I came to identify the various disparate facts that, coming together and aggregating like organic waste, had given rise to that legend or hoax that someone had once told me or that I only thought I’d heard but really made up myself. At the end of West 106th Street, the one renamed after Ellington, there is indeed an equestrian statue. It honors a Civil War general who was born in Switzerland but emigrated when he was very young. Now he sits upright on his horse looking west atop a marble staircase, eternally facing the river and the vast continent beyond as if prepared to ride across, holding the reins in one gloved hand and his wide-brimmed military hat in the other. Farther north and east, at the corner of Central Park near the small lake with a Dutch name, the Harlem Meer, there is a statue of Duke Ellington. He is not on horseback but rather standing next to a grand piano on top of a wretched contraption that looks like a scaffold and also a monument, not to jazz or to Duke Ellington but to wedding cakes, with Duke Ellington on top of it like a miniature groom, a miserable groom standing alone at the altar and also atop his own useless cake.

  * * *

  LET YOUR JOURNEY BEGIN. My street was very wide, but also quiet, with broad sidewalks and very little traffic. The width of the sidewalks is one of the beauties of New York. Outside a building across the street from mine I would often see splendid drawings done by children in colored chalk, resembling primitive paintings of animals and symbols: a dog, a sun, a row of squares for hopscotch. I would see the drawings but not the children who made them. A ruthless doorman sometimes erased them with a power hose. On that sidewalk, one night in December, Bill Evans came back from playing at the Village Vanguard to find all of his belongings in a pile: what little furniture he owned, his clothes, his records, his piano, his bed. He had been evicted for not paying the rent. Seeing a tall, skinny man go by, gangly, in a trench coat and glasses, with that tired air that is so common here, I would squint or close my eyes and see Bill Evans, the ghost of Bill Evans, a rare fellow man in a city of strangers. Pale-faced, engrossed, moving with the furtive gestures of a junkie, he would have darted out of the building almost always by night. He would have crossed the street at the light on 106th and West End Avenue, where I too have waited so many times to cross. He would have turned on Broadway at the corner now occupied by a KFC that stays open all night, so you see people asleep with their heads on the table among the leftovers and the bags of food and plastic containers. He would have walked to the subway station at 103rd Street and taken the 1 to the Seventh Avenue stop near the Village Vanguard. It was the same stop where I used to get off to go to a different job. The door to the Village Vanguard opens directly onto a narrow staircase leading down to the underground realm where ghosts find shelter.

  * * *

  THEY TURN UP WHERE YOU NEVER IMAGINED. I could have marked each of their addresses with different colors on a neighborhood map, taking advantage of the various pencils I now kept always at hand: one color for musicians, another for writers, one for the dead, another for those who never existed, another for those who so vividly pictured themselves walking or living here that they must somehow have left a trace of their presence, a shadow, fainter than other shadows but perceptible to those who paid close attention or who possessed the right instrument or sensing device. Billie Holiday on 104th, where the post office stands. John Coltrane on 103rd. Hank Jones lived at 108th and Broadway in a single room that served him as a minuscule apartment. He died there at ninety-two. A score of Debussy’s Études stood open on an electronic keyboard and the Grammy he had won years earlier was put away in a shoebox. Hank Jones accompanied Marilyn Monroe on the piano when she sang “Happy Birthday” to JFK. He was a gallant old man to the very end, a studious and active musician. I must have crossed paths with him many times on that sidewalk without seeing him or without recognizing him. On the very corner where he lived I once saw the pianist Fred Hersch walk by. No one else may have recognized him. There is probably no other city where people walk alone in such a state of absorption. Fred Hersch is someone who nearly came back from the dead, from a coma that was almost terminal. He and I were walking down Broadway at the same pace, quite close to each other, but I didn’t have the courage to say hello, to tell him how much I liked his music.

  * * *

  IT CAN CATCH YOU ANYWHERE. Federico García Lorca would have walked frequently down these same sidewalks during his time at Columbia. Flat-footed, a little clumsy, always hurrying from place to place in the city bustle. Seen and unseen. Six months later he left New York and never came back. Down Broadway, which is nearly unchanged in its architecture after all these years even if people are dressed differently, a stout old man walks slowly in a dark suit, formal, a foreigner, thinking that his murdered son must have stepped on this very sidewalk. His ghostly son, frozen by death in the prime of youth.

  * * *

  WHERE HAVE I HEARD THAT VOICE BEFORE? In a few minutes I could walk from where I lived to the corner of Riverside Drive and 109th. That is where Hannah Arendt lived until the end of her life. When I found out, I thought about the mark I would make on the neighborhood map. Then I realized that if Walter Benjamin had not taken his life in September 1940, if he had reached Lisbon and sailed to New York with the ticket and the visa stamp he had already secured, he would undoubtedly have lived on one of these streets too, perhaps in this very building. Toward the end, his will and his imagination were focused on New York. He had started learning English. He was fond of American films and he read Faulkner, Light in August, but found it so hard that he helped himself along with a French translation. It is surely characteristic of Benjamin to begin his study of the English language with a Faulkner novel.

  * * *

  WHEN THERE IS NO PATH, YOU BLAZE YOUR OWN TRAIL. Benjamin pinned a map of New York to the wall of his Paris apartment. He wrote letters to Gretel Karplus, Adorno’s wife, with whom he was probably or had once been in love. There are indications that they may have met secretly once or twice. Sometimes his letters were addressed to a PO box. The names of the women in Benjamin’s life seem taken from a novel, perhaps a novel enticingly titled with a woman’s name: Gretel Karplus, Asja Lācis, Ursel Bud, Olga Parem, Jula Cohn. He eagerly awaited her letters, with their exotic US stamps and the names of New York streets written in the upper corner of the envelope in her own hand. Seeing her handwriting was almost like seeing her walk down the street toward him—short hair, dark eyes, sharp features—back in Berlin. The envelope said “Christopher St.,” and he searched for it on his map, putting his face right up to it because he was very shortsighted and lacked the money to buy a stronger pair of glasses. It was the same way he leaned over a scrap of writing in a tiny hand or over a dusty, ancient-smelling book in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. When he was finally able to make out the name of the street on the map, he made a mark with one of his colored pencils. Gretel Karplus mentioned in a letter that she and her husband
had gone to see Lotte Lenya at a nightclub. It was like being in Berlin, Gretel said, as if those years had returned, 1925 to 1932. But the Christopher Street address is temporary. A few months later Karplus writes that they are preparing to move into a larger apartment facing the Hudson, on the thirteenth floor. Benjamin instantly searches his map for the blue swath of the river on one side of the island. Another envelope bears her new address: 290 Riverside Drive. From the desk, she says, you can see the river through the window. She is looking at it as she writes. “I wish we could go on a walk together along the Hudson, talking at ease about everything.”

  * * *

  NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE, WE ADAPT TO YOU. She pictures the walks they will take together when he finally comes to New York, the places she will show him. She even likes to imagine that she will have the courage to drive so they can see the city by car. Benjamin decides to learn English. He asks her to write him in English and feels pleased to understand her letters when she does. He reads Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” and takes down some notes for his project on Baudelaire and the city. He reads Henry James, The Turn of the Screw. He discovers Melville and reads one of his lesser-known novels, Pierre, where he finds stimulating descriptions of the streets of New York in the mid-nineteenth century. He reads James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice, which makes a big impression. He watches American films to get used to the sounds of the language. One night he discovers Katharine Hepburn and falls instantly in love with her. “I recently saw—for the first time!—Katharine Hepburn. She is magnificent. She reminds me very much of you. Has no one ever said that to you?” Increasingly anguished letters arrive at 290 Riverside Drive during the last days, from Paris, from an internment camp, from Lourdes: Benjamin says he has “a terrifying sense of being trapped.” The world crumbles all around him in Europe, but their letters keep going back and forth. In one of them, from the summer of 1940, Benjamin tells Karplus he had to leave Paris very quickly, bringing nothing but a toiletry bag and a gas mask. In the penultimate letter to arrive in New York he says to her, “We must make sure to put the best of us in our letters, because nothing suggests we will see each other again soon.”